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Regional Election Monitors Finish First Season

A presidential election year is always challenging for local registrars of voters: many more residents register to vote than in other years, and voter participation on election day is always significantly higher. Making the job more complicated in a presidential year, the State Legislature and the Secretary of the State’s office added new mandates, new voting equipment, new election software, and told the town’s nine councils of government to figure out how to train and support the local registrars in order to ensure a smooth presidential election.

Locally, the process went smoothly, despite the challenge.

The Legislature assigned to each of the state’s nine councils of government (COG) the responsibility for hiring, oversight, and definition of the role of the new mandated position of regional election monitor, even though COGs are non-partisan and were never before been involved with elections. The Legislature voted to award each COG about $11,000 to pay a part-time election monitor.

“This was an idea of the Secretary of the State’s office, that the COG be the implementer of regional [registrar] training,” said Sam Gold, executive director of the 17-town lower Connecticut River Valley COG (nicknamed RiverCOG) that includes Clinton, Old Saybrook, and Westbrook. “The COGs, though, viewed [the post] as another unfunded mandate pushed down [from the state] to the towns. This position should have been funded by—and out of—the Secretary of the State’s office. COGs are non-partisan bodies and so having COGs assist with elections is problematic.”

Though the new requirement was viewed skeptically by the state’s COGs—the COG that included the City of Bridgeport defied the state mandate and did not hire a regional election monitor—Gold said RiverCOG’s regional election monitor, Carol Conklin, did a wonderful job. As Public Act 15-224 defined the position, the regional election monitor had to have had prior experience managing local elections. Conklin had served for nearly eight years as Registrar of Voters in Old Saybrook before becoming selectman.

“When the [regional election monitor] requirement came out in 2015, various COGs perceived this as adding an another layer. In actuality, I think we’re a reasonably priced alternative to the lawyers in the State Election Enforcement Commission and Secretary of the State’s offices,” said Conklin. “Where there used to be 10 state lawyers, there are now three attorneys handling election and registrar questions.”

“We [the election monitors] were a liaison to buffer and answer registrars’ questions about election procedures, new equipment, election software, and any training they may have missed,” said Conklin. “I loved the position and love the election process. In Connecticut, we have one of the tightest, most secure processes.”

Each of Connecticut’s 169 towns has at least two registrars of voters, one a Republican, and one a Democrat. It is the shared role of each town’s registrars to register voters, canvas voters to keep the voting list current, and to oversee elections including the hiring and training of poll workers. Registrars are elected to the post and need to complete mandated training and divide and share the office’s duties.

“Because it’s a part-time job with flexible hours outside of the election season, most registrars need another job, so some miss state-sponsored training. And because they may do their work on nights, weekends, or after the work day ends, [it is a time] when state election offices are not open,” said Conklin. As the regional election monitor, “I fielded questions [from registrars] on nights and weekends.”

Much was new in Connecticut’s November 2016 presidential election process. For the first time in a presidential election, the state had election-day voter registration (EDR). Each town had to have a separate location, often at Town Hall, with its own set of specially trained poll workers whose sole responsibility was to take same-day voter registrations. Towns had to rent and install computers and telephones at the special EDR station.

“When a voter registration is entered in the new online system, you’re in real-time and checking [the voter] against DMV records and the state voter database,” said Conklin.

Each polling place also had to install and have available for the first time a handicapped-accessible voting station. Many were working with new state software for reporting results to the Secretary of the State’s office on election night and with new electronic poll books for voter lists.

The role of election monitor as Conklin defined it was to provide extra help to train, support, and prepare registrars who were new to the job or who were going through their first presidential election and may not have faced the problems tied to higher voting volume.

“In Middlesex County, 50 percent—8 of the 17 towns—had at least one registrar who had never been through a presidential election. None of the registrars had done EDR in a presidential election,” said Conklin.

Conklin gave one example of the type of support she provided on election day.

“When using the ballot tabulation machine, it should be emptied [after voters have entered] 900 to 1,000 ballots to avoid jamming. In some small towns, they have never seen that kind of volume. So at noon, I sent out an e-blast to remind everyone to check the ballot count on the machines. I got three e-mails back, thanking me for the reminder: their machines were already close [to the threshold],” said Conklin.

Emptying a ballot tabulation machine when full is a carefully regulated procedure to ensure the integrity of the election. One member of each political party stands next to the machine to watch while the ballots, already counted, are placed in a secure storage case.

Other support, both in advance of the election and on election day, was on technology/software questions. One polling place, for example, had bought iPads to use; these units appeared not to be fully compatible with the state’s election management software. And as the first presidential election with the new software, some software bugs arose and had to be addressed.

With the election and its audits now done, without any more state money to support regional election monitors, the job may end. A bill introduced in this state legislative session, for example, proposes their elimination. In the RiverCOG region, two-thirds of the roughly $11,000 allocation was used to pay the regional election monitor for the presidential election year. If the state mandate continues for the next election, the one with municipal races at stake, very little funding would be left to pay a monitor. With COGs facing their own budget cuts, it is unlikely that the COGS will decide to dip into their own budgets to fund the post.

For the November 2016 election, at least, Conklin is confident that the regional monitors helped registrars to successfully navigate a high voter participation presidential election year even in a year when they also had to use new technology, new procedures, and manage EDR.